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Forwarding Logs From The vCloud Suite To vCenter Log Insight

06.17.2013 by William Lam // 18 Comments

An exciting new product was just announced last week by VMware called vCenter Log Insight, which will be part of the vCenter Operations Management Suite when released. The announcement also includes a public beta for customers to try out the new log analytics product that allows administrators to easily get an understanding of both their physical and virtual infrastructure through the collection of log data. You can get more details on how vCenter Log Insight works by checking out this article by the Jon Herlocker, who is in the Office of CTO and focusing on vCenter Log Insight.

I had known about vCenter Log Insight for quite sometime now and like others within VMware, I had the opportunity to test drive the product early on and provide feedback to the engineering team. One of neatest thing about vCenter Log Insight, in my opinion, is the simplistic setup and the tight integration between vCenter Server and vCenter Operations Manager. During the setup of vCenter Log Insight, I was reminded about an article that I had written about forwarding vCenter Server logs to a syslog server. I thought, would it not be cool if we could forward logs from other products within the vCloud Suite to vCenter Log Insight using the same syslog-ng trick? I decided to compile a list of logs from each of the products within the vCloud Suite shared that internally and thanks to my colleague Michael White who also help vet the list by circulating it within engineering.

I then decided to create a very simple script called configurevCloudSuiteSyslog.sh that would allow users to easily configure each of the vCloud Suite products to forward their appropriate logs to vCenter Log Insight. The script is very simple to use, you just need to scp the script to one of the supported appliances within the vCloud Suite and specify the VMware solution name and the IP Address of your vCenter Log Insight Server.

Here is an example of running the script on the VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance):

Based on the VMware solution selected, the appropriate logs will be appended to /etc/syslog-ng/syslog-ng.conf to be forwarded off to your vCenter Log Insight Server. The syslog-ng client will automatically be restarted for the changes to go into effect as part of the script. In my environment, I have deployed the majority of products within the vCloud Suite installed and have configured each of them to forward their logs to vCenter Log Insight. This can be very useful from a troubleshooting perspective and being able to view and filter through all the relevant logs from a single location.

It was really interesting to see what the next "chattiest" VMware solution was from a log perspective in my environment, which turned out to be VIN after vCenter Server and ESXi host. I hope to see deeper integration between vCenter Log Insight and the rest of the vCloud Suite in future releases, but for now, if you have not tried out vCenter Log Insight, I would highly recommend you give it a try and provide any feedback you may have in the dedicated VMTN community forum.

If you are interested in the specifics logs that are being collected for each of VMware products, you can find the complete list below. Not all products from the vCloud Suite are listed here and some such as vCloud Director and vCloud Networking & Security provide native syslog configuration from the application standpoint which can be configured using either their UIs or APIs.

vCenter Operations Manager Analytics (VCOPS):

/var/log/vmware/diskadd.log
/var/log/vmware/vcops-admin.log
/var/log/vmware/vcops-firstboot.log
/var/log/vmware/vcops-watch.log 

vCenter Operations Manager UI (VCOPS):

/var/log/vmware/admin.log
/var/log/vmware/ciq-firstboot.log
/var/log/vmware/ciq.log
/var/log/vmware/diskadd.log
/var/log/vmware/lastupdate.log
/var/log/vmware/mod_jk.log
/var/log/vmware/vcops-admin.cmd.log
/var/log/vmware/vcops-admin.log
/var/log/vmware/vcops-firstboot.log
/var/log/vmware/vcops-watch.log
/var/log/vmware/diskadd.log
/var/log/vmware/vcops-admin.log
/var/log/vmware/vcops-firstboot.log
/var/log/vmware/vcops-watch.log 

vCenter Orchestrator (VCO):

/opt/vmo/app-server/server/vmo/log/boot.log
/opt/vmo/app-server/server/vmo/log/console.log
/opt/vmo/app-server/server/vmo/log/server.log
/opt/vmo/app-server/server/vmo/log/script-logs.log
/opt/vmo/configuration/jetty/logs/jetty.log 

vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA):

/var/log/vmware/vpx/vpxd.log
/var/log/vmware/vpx/vpxd-alert.log
/var/log/vmware/vpx/vws.log
/var/log/vmware/vpx/vmware-vpxd.log
/var/log/vmware/vpx/inventoryservice/ds.log 

vCloud Connector Node (VCC):

/opt/vmware/hcagent/logs/hca.log 

vCloud Connector Server (VCC):

/opt/vmware/hcserver/logs/hcs.log 

vSphere Data Protection (VDP):

/space/avamar/var/log/av_boot.rb.log
/space/avamar/var/log/dpnctl.log
/space/avamar/var/log/dpnnetutil-av_boot.log
/usr/local/avamar/var/log/dpnctl.log
/usr/local/avamar/var/log/av_boot.rb.log
/usr/local/avamar/var/log/av_boot.rb.err.log
/usr/local/avamar/var/log/dpnnetutil-av_boot.log
/usr/local/avamar/var/avi/server_log/flush.log
/usr/local/avamar/var/avi/server_log/avinstaller.log.0
/usr/local/avamar/var/vdr/server_logs/vdr-server.log
/usr/local/avamar/var/vdr/server_logs/vdr-configure.log
/usr/local/avamar/var/flr/server_logs/flr-server.log
/data01/cur/err.log
/usr/local/avamarclient/bin/logs/VmMgr.log
/usr/local/avamarclient/bin/logs/MountMgr.log
/usr/local/avamarclient/bin/logs/VmwareFlrWs.log
/usr/local/avamarclient/bin/logs/VmwareFlr.log 

vCloud Director (VCD):

/opt/vmware/vcloud-director/logs/vcloud-container-debug.log
/opt/vmware/vcloud-director/logs/vcloud-container-info.log
/opt/vmware/vcloud-director/logs/jmx.log 

vSphere Infrastructure Navigator (VIN):

/var/log/vadm/system.log
/var/log/vadm/engine.log
/var/log/vadm/activecollector.log
/var/log/vadm/dbconfig.log
/var/log/vadm/db/postgresql.log 

vSphere Management Assistance (VMA):

/var/log/vmware/vma/vifpd.log 

vSphere Replication (VR):

/var/log/vmware/hbrsrv.log 

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // syslog, vC Log, vCenter Log Insight, vcloud suite

Can You Backup & Restore Apple Mac OS X Guests Using vSphere Data Protection (VDP)?

06.14.2013 by William Lam // 1 Comment

It is really cool to see more and more customers show interest in running Apple Mac OS X on vSphere. Just the other day there was another interesting question that was raised from a customer asking whether vSphere Data Protection (VDP) would be able to backup and restore Mac OS X guests.  Apparently there is still an assumption that VMware Tools do not exist for Mac OS X guests? Perhaps virtualizing Mac OS X is still relatively new for some folks, but it is just like any other guest operating system that is supported on vSphere.

I think the following two statements should help clarify any confusion that may exist:

  • To virtualize an Apple Mac OS X guest, you need to be running vSphere on Apple hardware. This is due to a requirement in Apple's EULA and is also enforced within the vSphere platform. You can get more details in this article. 
  • VMware Tools does exist for Apple Mac OS X guests, take a look at this article for more details.

Now, if we take a look at VDP's evaluation guide on page 4 we will see the prerequisite for backing up a guest OS is pretty straight forward:

At least one virtual machine running a supported guest operating system (OS) with VMware Tools installed

Since Apple Mac OS X (10.8, 10.7, 10.6 and 10.5) is a supported guest operating system and we have VMware Tools for this operating system, then yes VDP can be used to backup and restore an Apple Mac OS X guest. To demonstrate that this actually works, I have a Mac OS X 10.7 VM running in my home lab (Apple Mac Mini which is not officially supported) and I have deployed the latest version of VDP.

I then setup the backup job for the Mac OS X guests using the super simple VDP backup wizard and then initiate a backup.

Now, let's say I accidentally fat fingered an operation and deleted this VM. Uh oh!? What am I to do? Well don't worry, VDP is there to the rescue!

To restore the VM, it is simply going through the VDP restore wizard and in just a few minutes, I  have now recovered my Mac OS X guest and it is up and running again!

I have said this many times, but it still amazes me on the number of guest operating systems vSphere supports! There really is no workload that vSphere can not virtualize! So if you have any use cases for Mac OS X workloads, rest assure you can safely virtualize it and back it up on vSphere.

Note: Though I showed using VMware VDP as the backup/recovery solution, you should also be able to leverage both VMware vSphere Replication as well as VMware Site Recovery Manager.

number of guest OSes the vSphere platform supports

Categories // Apple, Automation, ESXi Tags // apple, mac, osx, vdp, vSphere data protection

Configuring vSphere Infrastructure Navigator (VIN) To Manage An Alternate vCenter Server

06.11.2013 by William Lam // 2 Comments

When deploying vSphere Infrastructure Navigator (VIN), it is automatically associated with the vCenter Server from which it was deployed from and this behavior is by design. This means if you have two vCenter Servers, you will need to deploy two separate VIN instances, one for each vCenter Server as shown in the diagram below.

For scenarios where you have a separate management and compute cluster, each with their own vCenter Server, it can pose a problem if you want to run all your "infrastructure" virtual machines in the management cluster and not in the compute cluster. This very topic was recently brought up in an internal discussion and after explaining how VIN works, I safely assumed this behavior could not be modified. It turns out the discussion peaked the interest of one of the VIN developers and a suggestion was made on how one could potentially change this behavior. This un-tested (NotSupported) "workaround" would allow a user to deploy a single VIN instance under the management cluster and allow it to associate with another vCenter Server and its workloads. Below is a diagram on what this would look like.

[Read more...]

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // infrastructure navigator, ovfEnv.xml, vIN

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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